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Work-life balance has always been considered a women’s issue. It was mothers who struggled with the dual role of income-earner and family caregiver; mothers who were demoted or passed over for promotions because of their domestic responsibilities; mothers who earned less than their male counterparts and their childless female colleagues.

For a long time, Jennifer Berdahl, a professor of organizational behaviour at the Rotman School of Management, had an uneasy feeling about this diagnosis. She suspected men who took on child-rearing responsibilities — from stay-at-home dads to fathers who picked up the kids from daycare — paid a similar price.

Initially, there were too few non-traditional fathers to test her hypothesis. But finally, with couples beginning to split the responsibilities of child-rearing more equitably, she has been able to do the research to challenge the prevailing myth.

Berdahl has just published the results of two field studies she conducted in Toronto. The first was at unionized female-dominated workplaces ranging in size from 50 to 150 employees across Toronto. The union distributed her survey to 750 of its members. Those who completed and mailed it in received a $20 payment. The second was at a male-dominated public service organization. The survey was sent by internal mail to 1,310 employees with a $1,000 collective gift for the department with the highest response rate.

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In each case, she got back approximately 33 per cent of the questionnaires. The responses were virtually identical.

“Men who do the low-status ‘feminine’ work of child care and housework are likely to be seen as failed men,” she found. The more time they devoted to their families, the more likely they were to be seen as bad workers. They were teased by their co-workers, regarded as wimps or henpecked husbands, blamed for shirking, even if they worked late at home or came in early the next day. In some cases they were excluded from company activities, ignored or pressured to fall into line.

“Such mistreatment serves as a warning that an employee’s status at work is in peril,” Berdahl said. This sets the stage for loss of reputation, promotion or even employment. “Workplace mistreatment is often used to punish those who have transgressed unwritten social rules or who have violated norms and identities.”

In some ways, working fathers who take on domestic responsibilities are judged more harshly than their wives, Berdahl said in an interview. Women, who make compromises at work when they have children, suffer low pay and fewer promotions, but they are regarded by their colleagues as warm, likeable and normal. Men who pitch in at home face a double backlash: they are assumed to be less competent than their peers and they are exposed to derision and disapproval.

These findings help explain why so few working parents — of either gender — take advantage of programs designed to ease the time-crunch: flexible hours,parental leave, job sharing. The stigma is simply too strong.

But they also raise disturbing questions. What happens when the pressure to conform to gender stereotypes conflicts with a couple’s desire to share domestic tasks more equitably? Do some women with higher earning potential than their husbands stay home to meet traditional assumptions? Do some couples remain childless to avoid this dilemma?

“A basic tenet of economic theory is that people tend to make decisions that maximize their economic resources. A basic tenet of psychological theory is that people tend to do what they are rewarded for doing and avoid what they are punished for doing. For a growing proportion of workers, these forces are increasingly at odds,” Berdahl concludes.

It would be easier to solve this problem if it were a matter of sexual discrimination, as women believed for 30 years. There are legal and structural remedies for inequality in the workplace. There is no formula for changing deeply ingrained societal attitudes.

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